On 4 May Halima Cisse, from Timbuktu in Mali, gave birth to nine babies in a Moroccan hospital where the Malian government had sent her for specialist care. They were expecting seven babies, but the ultrasound scan missed two. Cisse was admitted to the hospital at 25 weeks, and the medics managed to extend her pregnancy to 30 weeks before she gave birth via caesarean section. The nonuplets, five girls and four boys, weighed between 500g and 1kg and all survived but are expected to remain in incubators for two or three months.
Before Halima Cisse's nonuplets, the record for the most children delivered at a single birth to survive was held by Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets in California aged 33 in 2009 after fertility treatment. Two cases of nonuplets have been recorded previously, one to 29-year-old Geraldine Broderick in Australia in 1971 and another to Zurina Mat Saad in Malaysia in 1999, but many of the babies were stillborn and none survived more than a few days.
Multiple births like these almost never occur naturally and usually result from fertility treatments, although, according to Youssef Alaoui, medical director of the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca where Cisse gave birth, she was not undergoing any fertility treatment when she conceived.
BBC News, May 6 2021
Questions:
a) Do you know any twins or triplets (or more - quadruplets [4], quintuplets [5], sextuplets [6], septuplets [7])?
b) Would you like to have a twin brother or sister?
c) Would you like to be the parent of twins, triplets (or more) in the future?